Evolution and function of the Chinese carved horse hitching stone post

This article focuses on a typical artefact in Mainland China: carved stone horse hitching posts and their distribution, history, types, and cultural meaning. It tries to interpret their evolution and the relationship between their functional and social change. This type of post was made exclusively for tying horses, from the Han Dynasty to the Yuan Dynasty (approximately 1st-13th century CE). Initially, posts were a practical tool used for simply tying horses, with no added symbolism. Later, the stone posts were carved with many decorative patterns. In the 1980’s, tens of thousands of stone posts were rediscovered next to gates of rural residential houses and seldom in cities. Both archaeologists and artists try to organize this sequence and interpret the symbolism. Patterns used on the posts, originating from fairy tales, religion and life, have different meanings. Nowadays because of the beautiful patterns and implied meaning, the posts were transported to cities and collected by museums, universities, parks and artefact shops. A collection of stone posts was put together and merged into the roadside landscape. The posts are treated as an antiquity and as a symbol of culture, art and taste. The function and symbolism of Chinese carved stone hitching post changed with the development of agriculture and transportation. Some of its original functions vanished, and the value changed from a practical implement to a standard of wealth, good taste and culture

Dynamic code mapping for limited local memory systems

Abstract—This paper presents heuristics for dynamic man-agement of application code on limited local memories present in high-performance multi-core processors. Previous techniques formulate the problem using call graphs, which do not capture the temporal ordering of functions. In addition, they only use a conservative estimate of the interference cost between functions to obtain a mapping. As a result previous techniques are unable to achieve efficient code mapping. Techniques proposed in this paper overcome both these limitations and achieve superior code mapping. Experimental results from executing benchmarks from MiBench onto the Cell processor in the Sony Playstation 3 demonstrate upto 29 % and average 12 % performance improve-ment, at tolerable compile-time overhead. I